Innholdsfortegnelse for 9th July 2021 i Guardian Weekly

Sexism on parade Female soldiers march in heels in preparation for a parade next month to mark 30 years of independence. Condemned as harmful and humiliating, several Ukrainian lawmakers then came to parliament with shoes and called on the country’s male defence minister to wear high heels to the parade. The Guardian Weekly Founded in Manchester, England 4 July 1919 Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia. The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power to account in the name of…

If you had been drawing up a list of possible locations for hell on Earth before last week, Lytton would probably not have entered your mind. Few outside British Columbia had heard of this Canadian mountain community of 250 people. Those who had were more likely to think of it as bucolic. Nestled by a confluence of rivers in the forested foothills of the Lillooet and Botanie mountain ranges, the municipal website boasts: “Lytton is the ideal location for nature lovers to connect with incredible natural beauty and fresh air freedom.” However, the village made headlines around the world last week for a freakishly prolonged and intense temperature spike that turned the idyll into an inferno. Canad a’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and the US president, Joe Biden, have warned…

CHINA Xi’s warnings as Communist party turns 100 Page 22 The public flogging in Obe district, captured on video that went viral this spring, was a mistake, a Taliban judge admitted. Commanders were angry. As urban Afghans shared the footage, it revived memories of darker times when militants ruled, and led to an outpouring of revulsion. Men with lashes take turns to bear down on a woman visibly bracing, even under her burqa, against the blows, and by the end screaming: “O God, I repent.” An audience of men and boys watch, or snap photos. The problem, the cleric explained, was not the punishment but the video, which circulated in April as the militants were consolidating control of the area. “She committed adultery, and I would have ordered the same…

Whenever Kim Leadbeater was asked if she would follow in the footsteps of her sister Jo Cox – the former Labour MP for Batley and Spen who was murdered by a rightwing extremist in June 2016 – and enter politics, she would always say no, for two reasons: “One was because I swear too much. The second was because I’m not very good at toeing the party line.” Will she be less inclined to speak freely now she is the constituency’s new MP? “Will I’eck!” she scoffed. It is Leadbeater’s brand of buzzy familiarity and plain speaking that rescued Labour last week from a third devastating by-election defeat in as many months, perhaps saving Keir Starmer’s leadership with it. Her narrow victory came after a campaign described as divisive. Eggs,…

An American luggage executive unscrewed four castors from a wardrobe and fixed them to a suitcase. Then he put a strap on his contraption and trotted it gleefully around his house. This was how Bernard Sadow invented the world’s first rolling suitcase, which he patented in 1972, roughly 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel or, put another way, three years after Nasa managed to put men on the moon. So why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Shiller discusses the matter in two different books, Narrative Economics and The New Financial Order. He sees it as an archetypal example of how innovation can be a slow-footed thing: how the “blindingly obvious” can stare us expectantly in the face for…

People across Canada are waking up to the reality that this is a country built on the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The horrifying reports of unmarked graves of children at residential “schools” in Kamloops, British Columbia; Brandon, Manitoba, and most recently Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan have shocked many Canadians and others around the world. However, these were not discoveries, but confirmations of what we knew all along: Canada was forged on genocide. In light of this, cities and towns across the country this year rethought the ways they marked Canada Day on 1 July. Some, like Victoria, cancelled it outright while others, like Iqaluit, scaled back the celebrations and treated it as a day of reflection and mourning. This is a good thing. Whether they happen in backyard…

Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson set a new piece of software running on a laptop then went to a nearby mall to get a sandwich for lunch. They hoped, on their return, to have the answer to a question that would change the music industry: can a computer pick a hit record? They had let their software loose on the Free Music Archive, one of the largest collections of copyright-free songs. These are written by little-known artists and commonly used for soundtracks and podcasts. They had instructed their computer to pick 20 songs based on their similarity to a tune Savage liked: I Wanted Every thing by Kurt Vile. Back in the office, they listened. “Every song was great,” says Savage, “and every song was of a similar genre.” Three…

In Washington and Oregon – two largely liberal, climate-conscious states – efforts to combat global heating have long been popular. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, put himself forward as a Democratic “climate candidate” for president in 2020. He argued that residents of the region would, in the absence of federal leadership, “do our part to address a global problem”. Climate conversations have generally centred on what north westerners could do to protect the planet or other people in places at greater risk of extreme heat. But after three days of temperatures near or above 38C in Seattle – a city where residents often describe the sixth month as “June-uary” – they are increasingly concerned about themselves. “It felt like we’d set our Earth on fire,” said Summer Stinson, 49. “There was…

When Wang Zhenyu moved out of his small village in central Henan province to the coastal city of Dalian at 18, he was astonished. “It was like a culture shock for me, even though it was just a big city in my country, not a foreign land.” A few years later when he was enrolled in Peking University as a graduate student, he found far fewer students in the country’s top university came from a similar background Growing up in a small village of 2,000 farmers, many of Wang’s childhood friends dropped out of school after finishing their nine years of compulsory education. Now with a decent academic job, Wang begins to experience “reverse culture shock” every time he returns home. “When I get together with my childhood friends in…

Not for the first time in the coronavirus pandemic, the UK finds itself in a unique position. Through a combination of history, biology, mathematics and politics, the country stands alone in pitting an advanced vaccination programme against a substantial wave of Covid driven almost entirely by the fast-spreading Delta variant. Nowhere in the world is the race between vaccination and virus more keenly watched than here. Other countries – Israel stands out – have vaccinated more of their population. India has endured more Delta cases. But much of North America, Europe and Asia are behind the UK with their vaccine programmes and are only now seeing Delta take hold. The variant accounts for a fifth of new cases in the US but is expected to dominate within weeks. After a…

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way. Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels. But, even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated…

In January 2020, when most of the world slept soundly in ignorance of the pandemic coming its way, a group of scientists at Oxford University got to work on a vaccine to save the planet. They wanted it to be highly effective, cheap, and easy to use in even the poorest countries. Prof Sarah Gilbert, Prof Andrew Pollard and others pulled it off. With speed crucial, they designed it and launched into trials before bringing in a business partner. The giant Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca would manufacture it, license it around the world – and not make a profit until the pandemic was over. It was an inspired, idealistic and philanthropic crusade – yet over the past year they have been attacked from all sides. As politicians, regulators, the public…

It is hard to believe it’s happening again, even harder to believe that so few people seem to know or care. A massive famine is unfolding in Tigray in northern Ethiopia. Five million people are in need of food aid, and perhaps 900,000 are already starving. It’s looking horribly reminiscent of the start of the 1984 famine, in which a million people died, most of them in Tigray. Like the last cataclysm, it’s caused by war and its associated crimes. This time, however, the man in charge is a Nobel peace laureate: the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. A great weight of evidence suggests his troops, and those of his Eritrean allies, are using hunger as a weapon. In February, Abiy’s government dissolved the boards of the most effective aid…

MUSIC Is it OK when a computer picks potential hits? Page 55 When a Paula Rego retrospective at Tate Britain in London was first suggested, it was welcomed as an irresistible proposal. For, as the show’s curator Elena Crippa observes, there is only a handful of contemporary female artists who have achieved comparable status. And there are not many artists who have made women their subject in the inward, intense and complicated way that Rego has over the decades – painting them in pain, power and surrender. This is the largest show of her career, with more than 100 pieces – paintings, collages, drawings, pastels, etchings, sculptures – many never seen in Britain before. It will be a chance to unriddle the stories the paintings tell and to celebrate an…

Growing up Protestant in Derry in the 1960s, Susan McKay was familiar with what she calls “the old cry of ‘no surrender!’”, which rang out at local unionist marches and gatherings. Towards the end of the decade, as civil rights protesters demanded an end to a political system designed to disempower Catholics, that unionist rallying cry grew louder and more strident in its opposition to the same. “I learned that an obdurate refusal to compromise was central to our history,” she writes in the book’s illuminating prologue. “We would not yield. We would not bend the knee. What we had we would hold. And if our backs were against the wall, we would fight.” In May this year, when Edwin Poots made his inaugural speech as leader of the Democratic…

What is “sustainable” when it comes to food? The question of what to eat to help combat climate change and environmental degradation is more vital – but also more confusing – than ever. So what are foods that, with caveats, are good for you and the planet? Grass-fed beef and lamb This is the most controversial, complex and caveated inclusion in this list, but regenerative agriculture (rearing livestock in a mixed farming system to restore organic matter – and with it, carbon – to the soil) provides highly nutritious red meat, to be consumed in moderation. Locally grown vegetables (fresh, fermented or pickled) “Britain grows about 50% of all vegetables it consumes and 16% of fruit. We should grow double that,” says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City,…

1 UNITED STATES Trump Organization charged with tax crimes The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been charged with a “sweeping and audacious illegal payment scheme” of tax-related crimes, marking the first criminal charges against the former president’s company following a years-long investigation by New York prosecutors. Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family for nearly 50 years, surrendered to the authorities at the Manhattan criminal courthouse last Thursday and was charged by the Manhattan district attorney with failing to properly report company perks, including rent-free apartments, school fees and cars. According to prosecutors, the Trump Organization paid employees rent, utility bills, garage fees, school expenses and other living expenses without properly declaring them “so that they could and did pay federal, state and local taxes…

CORONAVIRUS England to open up fully on 19 July despite big case rise Boris Johnson is poised to revoke hundreds of Covid regulations and make England the most unrestricted society in Europe from 19 July despite saying new cases could soar to 50,000 a day before masks and social distancing are ditched. In a sign the government may reimpose restrictions later in the year, the prime minister warned the public against going “de-mob happy”, however. He said opening up – including the lifting of all limits on sports events and nightclubs – would be safest during the school summer holidays and did not say the changes would be irreversible. Johnson said: “We must be honest with ourselves that if we can’t reopen our society in the next few weeks ……

The climate crisis means that summer is a time of increasingly dangerous heat. In the Pacific north-west last week, temperature records were not broken, but obliterated. In another heatwave earlier in June, five Middle East countries topped 50 C. The extreme heat reached Pakistan, where 20 children in one class were reported to have fallen unconscious and needed hospital treatment for heat stress. Thankfully, all survived. Additional warming from greenhouse gas emissions means extreme heatwaves are more likely and scientists can now calculate the increase in their probability. The 2019 European heatwave that killed 2,500 people, for example, was five times more likely than it would have been without global warming. In most places, extreme heatwaves will cause problems, from disrupting the economy to widespread mortality. In places in the…

Donald Rumsfeld’s name will forever be associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, alongside the widespread use of torture that has dogged America’s reputation since. It is not only the poor decisions he made as defence secretary for which Rumsfeld – who died last week aged 88 – will be remembered, but also his eff orts to cover up inconvenient facts that did not align with his version of reality. Documents surfaced after the invasion that showed that Rumsfeld was aware of the gaping holes in the intelligence about Iraqi WMD, but he consistently presented the claims to the public as cast-iron certainties. He also played down the growing insurgency against the US-led occupation after Saddam Hussein’s fall, dismissing the collapse of…

China will not allow “sanctimonious preaching” or bullying from foreign forces, its president, Xi Jinping, said last Thursday, on the centenary of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). In a speech in front of a crowd of 70,000 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Xi praised the ruling party for lifting China out of poverty and humiliation, and pledged to expand its military and influence. Standing at the Gate of Heavenly Peace above a portrait of Mao Zedong, Xi said the era of China being bullied was “gone forever”. “We will not accept sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us,” he said. “We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token we will never…

A quarter of a century after he founded Amazon in a Seattle garage, Jeff Bezos is preparing to loosen his grip on his $1.7tn company. Few employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters reckon Bezos will relinquish that much of his influence on the big decisions after Andy Jassy succeeded him as CEO on Monday. Bezos has become executive chairman of Amazon’s board and remains the biggest shareholder. But Bezos, 57, told his 1.3 million employees (whom he refers to as “fellow Amazonians”) that “as much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition”. “I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring,” he said. “I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives … I’m super passionate about the impact…

GEORGE MONBIOT Tigray’s food shortages are a political failure Page 48 If you are in the UK and have received the AstraZeneca jab, you may have been checking your batch number in the past few days to see if you were one of the 5 million Britons who received a version of the vaccine manufactured in India. That vaccine has not been approved by the European Commission for its new digital Covid certificate, which went live last week. The certificate allows a vaccinated person to travel, without the need for quarantine or further testing, between the EU’s 27 countries (and four associated European nations). Hence headlines over the weekend about “travel bans” and Europe being “off limits” to some British travellers. However, the odds are that UK citizens will probably…

When you look back at your earliest work, what do you feel? What has changed? The pictures have changed many times. They have to change, or they feel dead and I feel flat. You get interested in other things as you get older. I’m more interested in the Virgin Mary than in boyfriends. What has stayed the same? I always need a story. Without a story, I can’t get going. Maybe the story changes in the doing of it. I might discover it isn’t what I thought or intended. But I need it to find my way. I’m always looking for new stories. Which stories have been most beckoning – and why? I’ve found traditional Portuguese folk tales the most useful, because they are me, they are my background. I…

Horst Krüger, a German journalist and writer, originally wrote this evocative memoir in 1966 after attending the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where 22 former SS camp guards and lower officials were brought to justice for their part in the deaths of more than a million people. Looking round the courtroom, Krüger saw only ordinary men who had built a solid and respectable existence for themselves after the war, their appalling crimes forgotten until uncovered by a courageous state prosecutor, Fritz Bauer. Here for example was Wilhelm Boger, an “upright, reliable” bookkeeper, a man “you could depend on, who readjusted to life, who was able to sleep at night and who certainly had colleagues and friends and a family”. And yet, the court heard, apart from participating in countless gassings and mass…